Latest news with #Jarecki
Express Tribune
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Express Tribune
Assange unveils Cannes film
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has "recovered" from his years in detention, his wife told AFP, as a new documentary about him premiered at the Cannes film festival on Wednesday. Assange is at the world's biggest film festival to promote The Six Billion Dollar Man by American director Eugene Jarecki but is not yet speaking publicly. After posing for photographers on Tuesday wearing a T-shirt with the names of killed Gaza children, he reappeared Wednesday for the red-carpet screening wearing a black tuxedo. The 53-year-old former hacker has declined all interview requests, however, with his wife Stella Assange saying that "he'll speak when he's ready." But she was upbeat about his health and said he was already thinking about his next steps. "We live with incredible nature at our doorstep (in Australia). Julian's very outdoorsy. He always has been. He's really recovered physically and mentally," Stella, a Spanish-Swedish lawyer, told AFP. Assange was released from a high-security British prison last June after a plea bargain with the US government over Wikileaks's work publishing top-secret military and diplomatic information. He spent five years behind bars fighting extradition from Britain and another seven holed up in the Ecuador embassy in London where he claimed political asylum. 'Right side of history' Award-winning director Jarecki said his film aimed to correct the record about Assange, whose methods and personality make him a divisive figure. "I think Julian Assange put himself in harm's way for the principle of informing the public about what corporations and governments around the world are doing in secret," Jarecki told AFP. Anyone willing to trade years of their life for their principles, "I think you'd have to look at that person as having heroic qualities," he added. The film includes never-seen footage, including personal videos handed over by Stella, a Wikileaks lawyer who had two children with Assange while he was living in the Ecuadorian embassy. It also features testimony from people who helped spy on Assange, including an Icelandic FBI informant and a private security agent who said he installed bugs accessed by US security services in the Ecuadorian embassy. Ecuador's left-wing former president Rafael Correa, who offered Assange asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, also attended Wednesday's screening. "I believe we were on the right side of history," he told AFP. Jarecki's film seeks to address criticism of Assange, notably that he endangered lives by publishing unredacted US documents which included the names of people who had spoken to American diplomats or spies. 'Complete fabrication' The film extensively features supportive figures, while giving little time to opposing views. Baywatch actor and Assange friend Pamela Anderson makes an appearance, as does American whistleblower Edward Snowden, and left-wing Greek ex-minister Yanis Varifakis who compares the Wikileaks founder to Greek god Prometheus. The film lays the blame for the publication of a trove of 251,000 US diplomatic cables by Wikileaks in 2011 on veteran investigative British journalist David Leigh, alleging he published the password to access the database. Leigh, who collaborated with Assange while working at the Guardian newspaper, told AFP he had never been contacted by Jarecki and he called the theory "a complete fabrication". "It was Julian and Julian alone who did it. He's been trying to find an excuse ever since," he said by phone. Jarecki also dismissed any links between Wikileaks and Russian intelligence services over the leak of Democratic Party emails ahead of the 2016 US presidential election which embarrassed Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton. An investigation by US special counsel Robert Mueller, who probed alleged Russian interference in the 2016 vote, found evidence that Russian military intelligence hacked the Democratic Party and passed the information to Wikileaks. The documentary also examines the role of Swedish prosecutors in starting a sexual assault investigation into Assange, concluding that there was no case to answer. Jodie Foster on leaving US Meanwhile, speaking at the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday, Oscar-winning actor Jodie Foster told Reuters that she prefers to be outside the United States right now, citing better conditions in Europe's film industry as well as more freedom now that her children have grown up. Foster was in southern France for the premiere of A Private Life, a psychological thriller in which Foster assumes the role of a psychiatrist who tasks herself with investigating the death of her patient, played by Virginie Efira. The US-born actor, who won two Oscars for The Accused in 1989 and The Silence of the Lambs in 1992, had to speak in French only for the Cannes film that is screening out of competition. Foster, 62, began her career filming commercials at the age of 3 and has received numerous awards throughout her career, including an honorary Palme d'Or award from Cannes in 2021. "I'm really enjoying working outside the United States," she said, recalling how she is not as tied down to the US now as she was when her children were little and she had to stay close to home. Foster, who first came to Cannes as a 13-year-old when she starred in Taxi Driver, said working as a director in France was better than in the US because of more creative freedom. Blending genres, like director Rebecca Zlotowski does in Foster's new film, is very uncommon in the US, she said. Studios want a film to be either a thriller or a comedy, they don't want a mixture of the two, she said, whereas France allows the director to have more authority on such decisions. "That's the reason why filmmakers love to come here." In Europe, female directors also have had more opportunities compared with the US, said Foster, herself a director. "I'd only worked with one female director until a few years ago. Isn't that kind of amazing? After I've made 60 movies that I've barely ever worked with another woman?" she said. "Europe has always had a female tradition, or at least for quite a while. But in America, somehow that bias really took hold."
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
‘The Six Billion Dollar Man' Review: Eugene Jarecki's Julian Assange Doc Is a Jam-Packed Chronicle of Legal Persecution
Unless you followed the ups and downs — well, mostly the downs — of Julian Assange's life over the past 15 years, you'll have to wait until the last half-hour of Eugene Jarecki's new documentary, The Six Billion Dollar Man, to understand what its title means. By that point, the WikiLeaks founder had been holed up for over six years at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he faced imminent arrest by the UK authorities. It's then that we learn how the first Trump administration offered, via the IMF, to loan Ecuador's government $6.5 billion if they agreed to kick Assange out. The move is not exactly shocking, especially coming from a dealmaker like Trump, and it shows just how much the U.S. authorities were willing to pay so they could nab one of their most wanted men. More from The Hollywood Reporter 'Sentimental Value' Review: Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgard and Elle Fanning Illuminate Joachim Trier's Piercing Reflection on Family and Memory 'The History of Sound' Review: Paul Mescal and Josh O'Connor Bring Aching Poignancy to Restrained but Heartfelt Queer Love Story Paul Mescal Seduces Cannes With Gay Romance 'The History of Sound' Much of Jarecki's jam-packed and informative two-hour feature, which premiered as a special screening in Cannes, focuses on the decade-long legal rollercoaster ride that Assange and his team of committed lawyers were obliged to take. The film can get a bit repetitive during all those scenes at the embassy, which is not the most cinematic of locations. But we do grasp the sense of confinement and growing paranoia Assange experienced for years on end. Technically he wasn't in jail, but his life was under house arrest. The first half of The Six Billion Dollar Man gives us some of the backstory leading up to that point, showing how Assange rose from unknown Australian hacker to worldwide hero of free journalism to public enemy number one, especially for the American government. Founded in 2006, his tiny startup WikiLeaks became a phenomenon the next year when Assange released a video called Collateral Murder, unveiling leaked footage of U.S. Marines massacring Iraqi civilians. (Jarecki includes a long excerpt, which is as disturbing now as it was back then.) In the years that followed, the site dumped thousands of redacted documents online, including military field logs, diplomatic communications, and lots of nasty emails between members of the Democratic National Committee. This was a promising time for the internet, when it seemed like online journalism could shake up the world order. 'Would you rather not know?' a bearded Edward Snowden explains (presumably from Moscow), referring to the all the information Assange was offering up free of charge. But that period would be short-lived, especially when the U.S. struck back against the many compromising documents WikiLeaks was putting out in public. 'A fight with the Pentagon only ends one way,' is what one interviewee tells Jarecki, and the rest of the movie shows how our government desperately tried to land Assange behind bars, leaving him no option but to take political asylum in the only place he could get it. Jarecki is no stranger to the abuses of U.S. power, especially in early features like The Trials of Henry Kissinger and Why We Fight that focused on disastrous American foreign policy, from the Vietnam War to the War in Iraq. In the opening sections of his new doc, he does a good job contextualizing the importance of Assange's work, which aired lots of embarrassing — not to mention criminalizing — dirty laundry under the administrations of both Obama and Trump, neither of whom come off as good guys here. Enough happened in those early WikiLeaks years to fill an entire series, requiring Jarecki and his team of four editors to condense tons of material until they get to the heart of the matter for them, which is Assange's ten years of legal hell in England. Two co-stars appear in the story at that point: The first is Jennifer Robinson, a human rights lawyer and fellow Aussie, who defended Assange when he first received an international arrest warrant in 2010, then stuck with him until the bitter end. The other is Stella Assange, an attorney and advocate for WikiLeaks, who fell in love with its founder while he was under embassy lockdown, giving birth to their first child. For all the dark clouds of that period, the silver lining was that Assange — whose legal woes started with an eventually dropped rape investigation in Sweden — managed to find his soulmate. Chock-full of talking heads, archive footage, CCTV images, clandestine iPhone shots and catchy music cues that are also a tad obvious (in one scene, M.I.A.'s 'Paper Planes' drops as Assange tosses actual paper planes out of a window), the filmmaking in The Six Billion Dollar Man can be far more conventional than the man in question, whose appearance changes drastically as the years of purgatory drag on. But if there's more substance than style in Jarecki's movie, there's also plenty of truth-telling. And as Naomi Klein says toward the end of the film, in a simple statement that sums up what WikiLeaks represented back when it was created, and still means right now in our age of rampant misinformation: 'The truth matters.' 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Hindustan Times
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
'Recovered' Julian Assange arrives at Cannes wearing 'Stop Israel' t-shirt, promotes documentary
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has recovered well after his release from jail last year, his wife told AFP ahead of the premiere of a documentary Wednesday that includes never-seen-before footage of the whistleblower. Assange is at the Cannes Festival to promote the documentary by American filmmaker Eugene Jarecki, wearing a T-shirt with the names of killed Gaza children at a photo session on Tuesday. The 53-year-old former hacker is not talking to the media, however, with his wife Stella Assange saying, 'He'll speak when he's ready.' "We live with incredible nature at our doorstep (in Australia). Julian's very outdoorsy. He always has been. He's really recovered physically and mentally," Stella, a Spanish-Swedish lawyer, told AFP. Assange was released from a high-security British prison last June after a plea bargain with the US government over WikiLeaks' work publishing top-secret military and diplomatic information. He had spent five years behind bars fighting extradition from Britain and another seven holed up in the Ecuador embassy in London, where he claimed political asylum. Award-winning director Jarecki said his film, The Six Billion Dollar Man, aimed to correct the record about Assange, whose methods and personality still make him a divisive figure. "I think Julian Assange put himself in harm's way for the principle of informing the public about what corporations and governments around the world are doing in secret," Jarecki told AFP. Anyone willing to trade years of their life for their principles, "I think you'd have to look at that person as having heroic qualities," he added. The film includes personal videos handed over by Stella, who initially joined WikiLeaks as a legal advisor and went on to have two children with Assange while he was living in the Ecuadorian embassy. It also features testimony from people who helped spy on Assange, including a private security agent who said he installed bugs accessed by the American security services in the Ecuadorian embassy. Former Baywatch actress and Assange's friend Pamela Anderson, fellow whistleblower Edward Snowden, and Australian human rights lawyer Jennifer Robinson also appear. Jarecki pushed back on some of the criticism of Assange, notably that he endangered lives by publishing unredacted US documents with the names of people who spoke to American diplomats, including informants or human rights campaigners. He also dismissed any links between Wikileaks and Russian intelligence services over the leak of Democratic Party emails ahead of the 2016 US presidential election, which embarrassed Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. An investigation by US special counsel Robert Mueller, who probed alleged Russian interference in the 2016 vote, found evidence that Russian military intelligence hacked the Democratic Party and passed the information to WikiLeaks. "Other than from the mouths of people in the Democratic Party, we've never found any evidence of any linkages between WikiLeaks and Russia," Jarecki claimed. Ecuador's left-wing former president Rafael Correa, who offered Assange asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, was to attend the film's red carpet premiere on Wednesday evening. Jarecki was awarded the first-ever Golden Globe for documentary at Cannes on Monday for his previous work, including his 2018 film about Elvis, The King. This year's festival is one of the most political for years, with hundreds of film industry figures, including Hollywood heavyweights, signing a letter condemning what they called "genocide" in Gaza. It also denounced Israel's killing of Fatima Hassouna, a young Gaza photojournalist featured in the documentary "Put Your Soul in Your Hand and Walk", which premiered at Cannes last week.
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
With ‘Six Billion Dollar Man' Doc, Eugene Jarecki Wants Julian Assange to Be Seen ‘As a Full Person'
Julian Assange returned to the international stage at the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday, first standing before the global press wearing a T-shirt with the names of children killed in Gaza before donning a tuxedo to walk the red carpet with the team behind 'The Six Billion Dollar Man.' Directed by Eugene Jarecki, the firebrand doc shares rarely-seen footage from inside the Ecuadorian embassy while building on eyebrow-raising revelations connecting Assange's embassy surveillance to the late-billionaire and profligate Trump donor Sheldon Adelson. At the same time, the doc also shares a more up-close-and-personal – if not quite cuddly – side to a man Jarecki likens to 'a sphinx.' 'There's a Cheshire Cat quality to Julian,' Jarecki told TheWrap. 'He's always kept people guessing, and a lot of that was strategic. He had to, especially when taking on the U.S. government. So, if you're going to make a film about him, you can't avoid reintroducing some gray areas of his humanity. He doesn't come off as especially likable in the film, but he comes across as a full person. He deserves that.' Indeed, with 'The Six Billion Dollar Man,' Jarecki hopes to recalibrate Assange's public image, painting a more fulsome picture of the Wikileaks founder. 'I'm not here to do counter-propaganda,' Jarecki explained. 'I'm here to speak truth to power, especially after being subjected to a decade-plus of deeply choreographed state propaganda. It's been very convenient for the U.S. to cast him as Dr. Evil. Bill Hader even parodied him on 'SNL' as this cartoon villain. That helped distract from the actual crimes he exposed.' 'We do that to anyone we find inconvenient,' he continued. 'We target the person. With Julian, it became about whether he's a nice guy, how he treated his cat at the embassy, whether he has Asperger's, whether he's guilty of a crime in Sweden, even though he wasn't even formally charged there. It's classic propaganda, and can be very effective.' The doc moves chronologically, following Assange from the earliest Wikileaks bombshells through his 12 years spent between the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and the UK's Belmarsh prison. And after emerging as an Obama-era champion of free speech, Assange's liberal goodwill took a decisive nose-dive once pulled into the vortex of the 2016 presidential election. Jarecki hopes to recalibrate that conception as well. 'In 2016, he proved he belonged to no party,' the filmmaker said. 'That terrified people. He didn't play the partisan game. And those who once praised him had to renounce him, because he disrupted their political narratives. But maybe that's what made him most dangerous of all. He wasn't playing for either team.' 'At the time, many thought Hillary Clinton was hurt by something linked to Wikileaks,' he continued. 'Only what Wikileaks actually revealed was the DNC's bias against Bernie Sanders, which led to resignations and exposed real election rigging. Assange later pointed out that if he were trying to gain favor with the powerful, leaking damaging info about the likely next president wouldn't have helped him!' While celebrating Assange's release from prison and subsequent reunion with his wife and children, 'The Six Billion Dollar Man' shares many testimonies from associates more pessimistic about the recent crack-downs on press freedoms – among myriad other concerns leading one interviewee to look into the camera offering this succinct analysis: 'We're f–ed.' Does Jarecki believe that as well? 'If I believed that, I'd be in a bunker somewhere,' he laughed. 'Yes, self-censorship is real. But so is resistance. Fires are burning around the world, with every day bringing more protests, uprisings and acts of solidarity. History shows you can't silence people forever. People are waking up to the fact that injustice in one place affects everyone.' 'Whether you like him or not, Assange brought light, helping us see what was being hidden,' Jarecki said. 'In a time when powerful tech and governments want to control the digital narrative, he flipped the script. And as Victor Hugo said, 'Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.'' The post With 'Six Billion Dollar Man' Doc, Eugene Jarecki Wants Julian Assange to Be Seen 'As a Full Person' appeared first on TheWrap.
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
‘The Six Billion Dollar Man' Review: Timely Documentary Shows Julian Assange As Truth Teller Fighting Against Authoritarian Drift
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has been the focus of numerous documentaries: Alex Gibney's We Steal Secrets explored the website Assange created that exposed U.S. war crimes in Iraq, an immense cache of U.S. diplomatic cables, and much more. Oscar winner Laura Poitras also took a crack at Assange and Wikileaks in her 2016 documentary Risk. Assange himself directed a documentary short, Collateral Murder, about the 2007 video Wikileaks released that showed a U.S. military helicopter crew opening fire on unarmed journalists and civilians in Iraq. That may sound like sufficient coverage of Assange, but director Eugene Jarecki shows it's important to revisit him and the work of Wikileaks in light of rising authoritarianism in the U.S. and abroad. At a moment when democracy is in retreat (as author Anne Applebaum has put it), Jarecki's film The Six Billion Dollar Man raises the question of whether government by the people and for the people can function if citizens are denied information on what political leaders are doing in their name. More from Deadline NEON Takes North American On Buzzy Brazilian Pic 'The Secret Agent'; Can Distrib Go Six Palme d'Ors In A Row? - Cannes Carla Simón's 'Romería' Gets 11-Minute Ovation In Cannes Debut 'Romería' Review: Carla Simón Takes The Scenic Route For A Highly Personal Journey Of Self-Discovery - Cannes Film Festival The $6B of the title refers to Jarecki's estimate of the amount of money the U.S. government has spent trying to prosecute Assange, going back to the Obama administration. He has faced a variety of charges including conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act for publishing classified information supplied to him by former U.S. Army Spec. Chelsea Manning, and computer hacking. To Jarecki, these all fall under the rubric of killing the messenger – going after Assange because he dared peel back the curtain on government secrets. The Six Billion Dollar Man addresses many of the criticisms that have been leveled at Assange over the years – for instance, that his website recklessly released unredacted information, without considering possible harm to individuals named in documents. In the case of the U.S. diplomatic cables release, the documentary points out that Wikileaks worked carefully with the New York Times, Der Spiegel, and the Guardian to scrub the cables of information that would identify sources, but it was a Guardian editor who chose to publicly share the password to the full trove of unredacted cables. The filmmaker also questions the prosecution of Assange in Sweden, where he was wanted for questioning after two women sought HIV tests after having sex with Assange. For political reasons, Jarecki asserts, prosecutors eventually bandied about the word 'rape' even though the women involved did not accuse Assange of sexual assault. Jarecki interviews an Icelandic hacker nicknamed Siggi who joined Wikileaks as a volunteer when he was just a teenager. The film reveals Siggi, trying to save his own skin in a pedophilia investigation, agreed to the FBI's request to wear a wire in an attempt to ensnare Assange. But the recordings never found what FBI agents were hoping for – evidence of Assange encouraging people to illegally hack into government computer networks. Jarecki hints that Assange can be his own worst enemy by displaying a mercurial temperament and superior attitude. One person close to Assange observes in the film, 'He can be arrogant, even cruel.' But the documentary isn't putting Assange's personality on trial but questioning the lengths the U.S. government would go to shut him down. Ecuador, under then-president Rafael Correa, granted Assange's emergency request for asylum, allowing him to stay indefinitely in the Ecuadorian embassy in London where Assange sought refuge as U.K. authorities appeared set to extradite him to the U.S. But Pres. Correa's successor, immediately upon taking office, began to entertain offers of an aid package from the first Trump administration ('bribe,' if you prefer) to dislodge Assange from the embassy. Jarecki also reveals that casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, a big Trump backer, had his fingerprints on surveillance equipment installed in the Ecuadorian embassy in London to monitor Assange and record his voice at all times. The Six Billion Dollar Man is premiering in the Special Screenings section of Cannes. It serves as a companion piece, in a sense, to another film bowing at the festival: Raoul Peck's Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5. Both films cogently argue that ostensible democracies in the U.S. and elsewhere squash anyone who tries to tell the truth – anyone who insists that 2 + 2 = 4. Assange did the math, and paid the price. Title: The Six Billion Dollar ManFestival: Cannes (Special Screenings)Sales Agent: WMEDirector: Eugene JareckiRunning time: 126 min. Best of Deadline 2025-26 Awards Season Calendar: Dates For Tonys, Emmys, Oscars & More Broadway's 2024-2025 Season: All Of Deadline's Reviews Sundance Film Festival U.S. Dramatic Grand Jury Prize Winners Through The Years
